Digital Business Strategy for FMCG: The Difference Between Growing and Surviving
Growth in FMCG has always been tough. You’re fighting for attention in crowded aisles, balancing margins with market share, and trying to build loyalty in a world where switching is one swipe away.
But in 2025, it’s no longer enough to do digital. You need to be digital. And that’s where many FMCG brands fall short.
Because while most brands have embraced digital marketing (to some degree), very few have built a digital business strategy that connects all the moving parts from product to people, channels to data, content to commerce.
That’s the difference between growing and just surviving.
Let’s break it down.
Digital Business Strategy ≠ Just Marketing Online
Many brands assume that running Instagram ads or hiring influencers counts as a strategy.
But a digital business strategy goes deeper than communication.
It’s about how your entire business is shaped, powered, and scaled using digital across:
- Product innovation
• Sales channels (retail, ecommerce, social commerce)
• Customer experience
• Logistics and fulfillment
• Data collection and usage
• Team enablement and technology stack
It’s the difference between treating digital as a channel and treating it as the operating system for your business.
Why the Gap Exists
Let’s call it what it is: many FMCG brands still run with outdated playbooks. They’ve tweaked at the edges with a new agency, better packaging, maybe a CRM, but haven’t redesigned the core.
The result?
- Duplicated efforts across teams
• Disconnected customer journeys
• Data silos that don’t inform decisions
• Stalled growth in both digital and physical retail
Inthis article, we explain how businesses even with strong products lose revenue because their marketing and growth functions aren’t built for scale. The same applies to FMCG. You can’t just buy reach anymore. You need to build performance into your strategy.
What FMCG Brands Can Learn from Other Sectors
Look at the payment space. Inthis post on the business of card payments in Nigeria, we showed how growth wasn’t driven by advertising alone. It came from aligning customer experience, tech infrastructure, partnerships, and user education.
That’s a digital business strategy in action.
FMCG brands can take a cue. The question is no longer how many impressions did our campaign get?
It’s:
• Are we visible where and when customers are buying?
• Can our systems react in real-time to what’s selling?
• Are we set up to test and launch new SKUs digitally before scaling?
• Do our teams have the tools to act on insights, not just collect them?
How to Spot a Winning Digital Business Strategy
It’s not always loud. But it’s effective.
Here’s what it looks like in real life:
✔ A product development team using search data to validate trends
✔ DTC and retail data feeding into the same dashboard
✔ A seamless customer journey from ad to checkout to delivery
✔ Campaigns informed by first-party insights, not hunches
✔ A test and learn culture across creative, pricing, and channels
✔ AI and automation freeing teams to focus on strategy, not grunt work
This isn’t some far-off dream. It’s already happening. The brands that will win in the next 3 to 5 years are already moving like tech companies with the speed and flexibility to evolve.
Want to see how we help brands get there? Check out ourDigital Strategy Services for a deeper dive into how we align growth, technology, and execution.
Bottom Line: Digital Isn’t a Department, It’s the Business
The brands that are still treating digital as “the marketing team’s job” will struggle to keep up.
The ones that treat digital as a business capability spanning product, growth, data, and customer experience will build resilience and momentum.
So the real question is:
Is your FMCG brand set up to grow or just survive?
If you’re ready to turn your digital chaos into a connected, revenue-driving system, we can help.
👉Let’s talk. We’d love to hear where you are and where you want to go.
